The Pentagon is the most formidable redoubt in official Washington.
Squat and solid as a feudal fortress, it hunkers in a remote reclaimed
Virginia swamp that used to be called Hell's Bottom, across the Potomac
River from the spires, colonnades and domes of the federal city.
Through its two tiers of subbasements and five aboveground stories,
windowless corridors weave like badger warrens. The bastion of
America's military establishment not only houses the Secretary of
Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a mint of high brass, but is
also a beehive of bureaucracy where some 10,800 civilians shuffle
routinely through the daily load of paperwork. It is actually five
giant buildings, concentrically interconnected and braced one upon
another. Against that physically and functionally immovable object last week
surged a self-proclaimed irresistible force of 35,000 ranting, chanting
protesters who are immutably opposed to the U.S. commitment in Viet
Nam. By the time the demonstration had ended, more than 200
irresistibles had been arrested, 13 more had been injured, and the
Pentagon had remained immobile. Within the tide of dissenters swarmed
all the elements of American dissent in 1967: hard-eyed revolutionaries
and skylarking hippies; ersatz motorcycle gangs and all-too-real
college professors; housewives, ministers and authors; Black
Nationalists in African garb—but no real African nationalists;
nonviolent pacifists and nonpacific advocates of violence—some of them
anti-anti-warriors and American Nazis spoiling for a fight. Acid & Acrimony. The demonstration began under a crystalline noonday sky
at the Lincoln Memorial. It took on special impact by climaxing a week
of antiwar protest across the nation. Beneath the marbled gaze of
Lincoln's statue, red and blue Viet Cong flags mingled with signs
affirming that “Che Guevara Lives,” posters proclaiming “Dump Johnson”
and asking “Where Is Oswald When We Need Him?” The meeting had hardly
begun before three Nazis were arrested for jumping a British
trade-union orator who criticized U.S. involvement in Viet Nam.
